


Old Remembered Acts of Dogamatism

by tangerinefields



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter), Sirius is trapped and Remus is tired, Sirius' summer at Grimmauld Place, and they muddle on regardless, in the shadow of the war that was
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 20:08:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4318191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangerinefields/pseuds/tangerinefields
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sirius, kicking his heels in that first, hot summer, decides to dog Remus with unsolicited advice on his work for the Order, the shadow of the old war long between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Remembered Acts of Dogamatism

“What did you get from Azzar?” Sirius’ interest was intense and unsolicited. He’d unfolded from the sofa when Remus got in and waited with him in silence, sprawled out on the stairs, as Remus took off his dusty shoes. Outside, the temperature was soaring. He knew because he sat and watched the leaves shrivel and drop from the aspens. A man had been on the square with a housepipe but Arthur reported that the Ban had gone up a week ago, and Sirius hadn’t seen him since.  
Remus let the question sink while he pulled his shirt over his head. He arched his back, the muscles tense. Sirius took his shirt from his hand and folded it, poorly, on the bed.  
“Not much,” he said, finally. He finicked with his belt but not enough to warrant Sirius stepping up and undoing it for him, his hands curving round him as he drew it from his waist. The white cotton of Sirius’ shirt brushed against Remus’ skin and he felt tired. He waited for Sirius to step back and when he didn’t, he stepped back himself. “How do you know about Azzar, Sirius?”  
Sirius shrugged. He rolled his lips between his teeth. “You were talking in the hall.”  
Remus sighed and stepped out of his trousers. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his boxers and pulled them down, the white range of his spine curving away behind him.  
“I might have shower,” he said. Sirius followed him to the door, leaning up against the frame as Remus spun the tap to warm the water.  
“You going to chase him up?”  
“Azzar?” Remus wiped the cold spray from his hands. “No. I don’t think he knows anything.”  
“Where was the meet?”  
“In his house.”  
Sirius tsked. “He knows something. No innocent man invites the Order into their home. They think we track blood.”  
“That was a different war, Sirius.”  
Sirius’ lip pulled sideways into his cheek. “You should chase it.”  
“Alright.” There was steam filtering up from the bath and Remus could smell Azzar’s on his skin. His wife had left him, he said, left him apparently incapable of washing up the stale curries he ate from the freezer and then abandoned to rot in their containers on the side, on the table, on the sofa arm nudging Remus’ elbow. It was making his nose burn.  
“I’ll have that shower now,” he said. “Could you close the door?”  
Sirius stepped forward to close himself in and Remus, his patience down the plughole, sighed, “From the other side, please.” 

“I’m sorry I said that.” He held a limp bath towel around his waist. “I needed time to think.”  
“Yeah,” Sirius nodded. “I know that.” He had picked up Remus’ trousers from the floor and piled his clothes at the end of the bed, his belt the leather loop that topped the construction. The bedstead was digging into his shoulders but he didn’t seem to mind, or he hadn’t noticed. He sat cross-legged with scope of the room open to a turn of his head and watched Remus doggedly as he moved about the floor.  
“What state was the house in?”  
“Azzar’s?” Remus asked, trying to aim his sigh into the wardrobe so that Sirius wouldn’t notice. “All of the cleaning enchantments have lapsed.”  
“Doesn’t he have a wife?”  
“She left him.”  
“How long?”  
Remus sat down on the edge of the mattress to pull on his pyjamas. It sagged and Sirius slipped a little from his vantage point. “Months, maybe.”  
“He didn’t say?”  
“No.” He’d pulled the waistband around his knees when he changed his mind. He let the pyjamas slip and waited, naked, on the edge of the bed for the next question.  
“It’s strange that he didn’t mention it.”  
“Do they usually?”  
Sirius shrugged. “Did you take the dust from his shoes?”  
“No.”  
“Why not? It’s a simple enough accio into prepared container. And then you can track his movements. The giveaway’s marble dust, because they all have such ridiculous houses. Although we busted a bloke once who just spent a lot of time with the Rodins in the National Gallery.”  
Remus put a foot on the bed and pushed himself up, making the mattress jump. He sat down against Sirius’ crossed legs and parted the buttons of his shirt. Between the scars, Remus’ skin had darkened in the continental summer. Sirius’ had not.  
“Did it look like a woman’s house?”  
“I know the wife exists.” It was a little impatient, tired. He had spent the last three hours in Llandudno raking through the details with Kingsley and his brain felt stretched to translucency. At a bench on the sea front, he’d paused, looking longingly a long gone ice cream splash on sandy feet. ‘We always go to Brighton,’ Sirius had said, in the summer of 1980. ‘Where did you go as a kid?’ And so they’d sat on the bench in the sun, eating ice cream from Fortes and stayed in one of the narrow pastel houses with a view onto the shore. He would be a fool to imagine that they hadn’t mulled over Sirius’ cases then. He offered every one with an honest view to enlightenment by Remus’ opinion. ‘You would have been good,’ he said once. ‘Yes, perhaps,’ Remus had said, ‘But that’s easy to assume from the living room.’  
He shouldn’t mind now the tables had turned but Sirius supposed too much of him, of the capabilities of a weakened Order to analyse dirt samples. Sirius and James would have found a way, of course, but Sirius was softly going mad and James was in the ground. What Remus wanted was sleep but he wasn’t going to get it if this line of questioning continued. Sex was the answer. Sirius was so starved of human contact that the overload of skin on skin knocked out his brain. It was a cruel resort and Remus felt it as he unbuckled Sirius’ belt but he felt his own exhaustion just as keenly.  
“Azzar are an offshoot of the Shafiqs, from about the 1850s.” Sirius’ mouth was still working even as Remus’ hand curled around his cock. “He’ll know something, even if it’s only a name. The eldest two sons were death eaters the first time round.” He gasped between his teeth and Remus kissed him.  
“Are you sure you’re not too tired?”  
“Yes.”  
For a while, blissful silence reigned until Sirius choked, “Did you check the fridge? People keep- people keep notes on-“  
Remus smartly let go and Sirius whined.  
“Would you suck me off?” Remus asked, convivially.  
“That was blunt.”  
“Yes,” He agreed. “But I’d like you to.” Sirius had, on one memorable night in 1979, refused to touch Remus unless precisely instructed as to where, what and how. His embarrassment had been vaguely frustrating until he’d mumbled ‘phallus’ and Sirius had laughed so much they had to call the whole thing off.  
“I’m talking too much, aren’t I?”  
Remus smiled, quite tightly.  
“Yeah, alright.” Sirius blew out his cheeks. “But you’ll need to budge up, I’m in the wall.”


End file.
